1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for providing digital contents capable of discriminating a user terminal by acquiring image data and a method of discriminating a user terminal. More specifically, the present invention relates to an apparatus for providing digital contents that acquires image data by photographing a user terminal intending to receive digital contents, discriminates the type of user terminals through the acquired image data, converts the digital contents to meet the user terminal, and provides the converted digital contents to the user terminal and a method of discriminating a user terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Currently, a mobile telephone, which represents a personal communication device, has various additional functions in various types. The mobile telephone already includes a high pixel camera phone, a digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) receiving function, etc. In particular, the mobile telephone already has a file viewer or a text viewer that is included in an existing smart phone, etc. Further, the mobile phone has functions such as a moving picture player, an MP3 player, etc. which are already widely used in the representative mobile terminal. Meanwhile, a personal multimedia player (PMP) includes a wireless communication device such as an HSDPA modem or a wireless LAN device in addition to a moving picture and music reproducing function, a text viewer function, a navigation function, etc. and an Internet browser that is software, such that it has a function of wirelessly accessing Internet. The i-Pod Touch available from Apple Co., etc., has various moving picture and music reproducing functions, a slide show function, etc. and accesses the Internet by its own wireless LAN function in order to provide a function that allows purchase digital contents online. In the following description, a personal media reproducing device having basic functions such as the foregoing multimedia reproducing function, the file viewer, etc. and a computing device, which will be available on the market in the future, are collectively referred to as a portable media system (PMS).
Generally, the PMS is implemented by a computing system with various specifications. In order to implement the PMS, a variety of systems on chip (SoCs), digital signal processors (DSPs), etc. has been actually used and a main memory and a sub-memory also having various capacities and types according to the specification of the PMS.
Representatively, as the main memory, an SDRAM has been the most widely used up to now and as the sub-memory, a non-volatile flash memory has been the most widely used. Until now, since a reading/writing speed of the flash memory cannot correspond to a reading/writing speed of the SDRAM, the SDRAM is required to rapidly execute programs and two memory parts are required. However, the performance of a flash memory is improved, such that a system having only a flash memory is naturally expected to launch on the market.
Generally, the PMS use many various display devices, which is a natural consequence due to different PMS makers or usages. This includes a mobile telephone, which have various display devices for each different type of mobile telephones. The smart phone or the PDA generally has a display device relatively larger than that of the mobile telephone for the purpose of a user interface. A game machine or a PMP has many various sized display devices in order to represent features of products for each maker that manufactures each device.
As described above, the current PMSs have different sizes and resolution of a display device, different color levels, reproducing capability of a computing system, etc. Therefore, in order to use various PMSs, there are problems in that a user should recognize information on the devices, which are owned by the user, and the user's PMS device should secure reproducible contents. For example, there may occur a case where moving pictures, which can be reproduced by a PDA from ‘A’ Co. using Windows mobile operating system from Microsoft Co., cannot be reproduced by a PMP device manufactured by ‘B’ Co.
In other words, each PMS device may be configured of different hardware according to a maker or a type of device and an operating system operating the PMS devices may also be different according to a maker or a type of device. In addition, a type of codec to support the multimedia reproduction in each PMS device is also different and the size and specification of the display device displaying the finally calculated image may be different. Therefore, there may be a situation where the compatibility of usable contents between different PMSs is very low. In this situation, the user confirms the specifications of the PMS devices owned by the user one at a time in order to acquire contents suitable for his/her PMS and then uses the contents conversion software suitable for the specifications to convert and acquire the contents.
Meanwhile, the various PMSs described above have been subjected to various technical evolving processes and rapidly expanded to a public. According to this tendency, apparatuses for providing digital contents in order to provide or sell multimedia contents, such as various movies, dramas, music videos, e-books, etc., which are sold online, to the PMS offline, have been developed.
The apparatus for providing digital contents described above is installed inside or outside a room where there are a plurality of users and receives the corresponding digital contents from a central server using a pre-stored wired data network according to a request of a user and transmits them to a user terminal. As a result, the apparatus for providing digital contents is an apparatus for charging a fee. The apparatus for providing digital contents provides contents data to the mobile device of the user without separately paying a fee for the use of the packet. As a result, the user can be conveniently provided with the digital contents at a desired location at lower price than a case where the user is provided with the digital contents through wireless Internet services of existing mobile operators.
FIG. 1 is a diagram for schematically explaining a configuration of an apparatus for providing digital contents according to the related art.
A general apparatus for providing digital contents includes: an input unit 10 that receives user selection or information on a user terminal owned by a user; a display unit 12 that displays a providable contents history to the user; a content converter 16 that converts stored contents to meet the user terminal; a content storage unit 18 that stores various multimedia contents; and a controller 14 that controls each unit so that the contents selected by the user can be converted to meet the user terminal and transmitted to the user terminal.
A process of purchasing contents when a user purchases contents in the apparatus for providing contents having the above configuration will be described below. First, the user should input information (for example, model name) on the mobile terminal owned by the user through the input unit 10. The reason is that there are various types of mobile terminals as described above. Further, this is to convert the contents selected by the user to meet the mobile terminal of the user and provide them. For example, in the case of the mobile telephone, an LCD screen has very various resolutions such as 800*600, 640*480, 320*240, etc., according to a maker or a model.
In order to smoothly reproduce the contents downloaded from the apparatus for providing contents in the user mobile terminal, the downloaded contents undergo a conversion process such as transcoding, etc. in order to meet each terminal. If the downloaded contents do not undergo the conversion process, fatal problems occur in that the mobile terminal of the user is reset or the system goes down due to the downloaded contents. The transcoding technology actually used to convert the contents is very technologically complicated due to various input parameters, such as a wide moving picture codec, a digital right management (DRM) technology, etc.
Therefore, the apparatus for providing contents should know the information (for example, model name) beforehand on the user terminal in order to correspond to the mobile terminal of the user having different hardware and software specifications. At this time, assume that the hardware and software specifications corresponding to the model name of the user terminal are previously determined.
The apparatus for providing contents according to the related art directly uses a method that receives the model name of the terminal from the user or provides the information (for example, model name) on various terminals for each maker and receives the user selection in order to achieve the foregoing description, that is, to discriminate the specification (hardware and software specifications) of the user terminal. In order to use the method, the user should know beforehand the detailed information on the terminal owned by the user.
However, it is difficult for users who are not familiar with the use of the IT devices, to know the detailed information of the terminals owned by the users. Further, there occurs a case where the user abandons the purchase of the contents before finishing a trouble process of discriminating the user terminal by the apparatus for providing contents. This is the main factor that hinders the activation of the apparatus for providing contents.